Waterboarding

via MAL Contends - Christopher Hitchens, on assignment from Vanity Fair, arranged to be tortured by waterboarding and write a first-person account. He lasted for 17 seconds during the exercise. From Vanity Fair (video follows below here), Hitchens writes: Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, 'waterboarding' was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict. [Read the entire piece at Vanity Fair.] The video is not for children to watch, but very much for adults to watch and act against this obscenity of our government.

Randall Mikkelson/Reuters: U.S. used waterboarding but no more: ex-spy chief It (waterboarding) wasn't used when I [Negroponte] was director of national intelligence, nor even a few years before that," he said. "I get concerned that we're too retrospective and tend to look in the rearview mirror too often at things that happened four or even six years ago." Maybe ol' Uncle John is right, and that man and his child will look back on those peaceful, hooded days, inside a barbed wire enclosure with no way in or out as the war raged around them as "the time of their lives". Sure, sure. Five years is such a long time ago, and children are so bloody resilient. Be American. Think nothing of it. [BBC Image: Story of the War]